The simplest awareness is like this: an ocean. And then: Waves. Rhythm, or Wind. Light, translucence, and the empty sky. You and I, arising. This is all that has ever been. Hidden from view, a moon is cracked open– its yolk plopped into the ferment. Illusion is endorsement of the sensation that something Happened, and it stuck, and now we need to find out what It was. It is the locally embodied transient intoxicating ramshackle belief […]
I have made modest progress over the past eight or nine months on the draft of a novel. If the 100k word mark is what puts you in the ballpark to being able to say a novel has been written, I’m just over 2/3 of the way there– sans editing. I have no previous experience in this sort of thing, but I figured the first and most important part was just to write and don’t […]
The places within us that are not yet healed, and have not yet been dissolved into the pure and guiltless and shameless and never-confounded substance of being, are like movie stars, and the events of the lives we lead the flash bulbs of a traveling horde of annoying paparazzi. Our wounded places simply can’t avoid them—can’t get a break. Offstage, without their make-up on, these stars just want to be left alone. Can we not […]
I have had a longstanding interest in both science and spirituality, and since I don’t even know what these words mean anymore, let’s just call it a longstanding interest in desiring to know and understand the experience you and I have found ourselves within. This process of coming to know has been alive within me since early days, and it has been fueled by my daily encounters with a broken world, with a self whose […]
It’s easy to think I have made a breakthrough, put the pieces together just right, as if I were a scientist grappling with and making plain the mysteries of salvation. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to conjure an image of myself twirling a dry erase marker in one hand and sloshing a cup of coffee absentmindedly in the other while pacing back and forth in front of wall-to-wall white boards. On them are scribbled […]
The question in my heart today is this: what is possible? That is actually a poor translation of what is in my heart, because this simple question is so abstract it permits responses like, what is possible… ever? And the answer then is… well… anything, I suppose… This is not the question. I am not filled with a question about what might happen in places and times so remote from where we stand today as […]
We are interference patterns in the Mind of God. What I mean, is that a miracle emerges in every moment where our two (or three) waves intersect, where they merge for just an instant as they ripple along their way. Your wave is who you are, given freely into limitlessness. Our waves, our gifts of Self and Love, extend ever outwards, pass through one another, illuminating each to each, giving grace to grace, birthing patterns […]
This post is part of a series on the subject of Awakening sponsored/inspired by Barbara Franken—a January Challenge that has claimed the first week of February as it’s own as well… * * * * * One of my favorite descriptions of awakening comes from the book Dialogues on Awakening by Tom Carpenter. These are Tom’s recounting of conversations he has had with his friend and brother, Jesus, that grew out of his daily practice […]
I could say I wasn’t afraid. But I was. Me and that feeling looked each other in the eye, and I looked away. Shrugged my shoulders. Flicked up my collar. Kicked the dirt. Got a hobby. Next day shipping, of course. Ran half way across the world. Whatever. I was desperate to tag out, to sneak out of the ring, maybe get into promotions, have an office with high ceilings, be famous or happy or […]
I love science- the way it pries open the mind, the way it reveals the marbling of connection that courses through world like a vein of sparkling ore running deep through a mountain, the way it points to a destination without ever quite arriving. When- after digging through the till, sifting, examining, illuminating, testing, and finally conceding the point- we admit our befuddlement, and we dare to ask the types of questions our previous world […]
Embracing Forever 